1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of television. More specifically, the present invention relates to searching interactive broadcast data, such as an electronic program guide, that is being transmitted over a television network.
2. The Related Art
The number of viewers tuning into television programming continues to grow. This is in part due to the large number of programming options available. On many television networks, there are often hundreds of channels available. From among these channels, television viewers may find programming on a very large number of topics at any given time. Some channels also include interactive broadcast data such as news headlines or sports scores that are updated and displayed simultaneously with other programming.
Due to the large number of programming options, television networks may use an electronic program guide. An electronic program guide may include a listing of future programs, what channel the programs will be broadcast on, the time of broadcast, and a text description of the programs. Such guides are usually broadcast on a particular channel and updated as particular programs are complete or when new programs are scheduled for broadcast. Thus, electronic program guides may also be termed as interactive broadcast data.
Electronic program guides have greatly reduced the amount of time it takes for a user to find a particular program. However, electronic program guides often include hundreds or even thousands of programs for a particular time slot. As a result, finding a program can still be time consuming. To reduce the amount of time needed to find a program in an electronic program guide, conventional methods to search the program listings of a guide have been developed.
To search an electronic program guide, for example, some type of processing capability must be available. In many instances, this will be a set top box, which includes various hardware and software components that may be used to perform the search. A user would enter a string of text into the set top box using some type of input device, like a remote control or keyboard. The set top box would then search each program listing character by character to see if the entered text string was included in any of the program listings.
Searching an electronic program guide in this manner is highly inefficient because it requires a character comparison between each character in the entered string of text and each character included in the electronic program guide. With potentially thousands of electronic program guide listings and with each listing including potentially hundreds of characters of text, this may result in tens or hundreds of thousands of comparisons. Performing these types of searches on set top boxes, many of which have limited processor and memory resources, may consume a significant amount of time.
Therefore, what are desired are systems and methods for efficiently searching interactive broadcast data, such as an electronic program guide, where the systems and methods also conserve resources of associated processing systems.